Cyber criminals employed a number of new tactics to better conceal exploit kits from security systems including the use of anti-forensic mechanisms and URL pattern changes, the company said in its "Security Annual Threat Report".

Modifications in landing page entrapment techniques; steganography which is concealing the file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video, and modifications in landing page entrapment techniques, were also used effectively to compromise the security, it added.

"Cybercrime has increased significantly around the globe in 2015 and there have been repeated incidents of breaches against organisations who believed that they had carried out their end-to-end security deployment perfectly." said Amit Singh, country manager, Dell SonicWALL.

The company emphasised on the criticality of maintaining 360 degrees of vigilance.

"Many of the breaches in 2015 were successful because cyber criminals found and exploited a weak link in victims' security programs due to disconnected or outdated point solutions that could not catch these anomalies in their ecosystem," said Curtis Hutcheson, general manager, Dell Security.

Dell SonicWALL noted a rise in the use of exploit kits.

While the year's most active kits were Angler, Nuclear, Magnitude and Rig, the overwhelming number of exploit kit options gave attackers a steady stream of opportunities to target the latest zero-day vulnerabilities, including those appearing in Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader and Microsoft Silverlight, the report said.

It also noted that malware attacks nearly doubled to 8.19 billion with Android ecosystem being prime target, putting a large percent of smartphones at risk globally.

According to Patrick Sweeney, vice president of product management and marketing, Dell Security, although the release of Android 6.0 Marshmallow operating system in October 2015 included a slew of new security features, "we can expect cyber criminals to continue finding ways to circumvent these defences".

"Android users should exercise caution by only installing applications from trusted app stores like Google Play, keeping their eye on the permissions being requested by apps, and avoid rooting their phones," he added.